July 21, 2021

Dear Don,

Thank you for your letter. When I ask you to forgive me for replying, I am not being ironic. Writing is my life, and when I answer a letter I exploit the likelihood that what I write will be read. The circumstance that I answer every letter, means that if my correspondence is answered, it goes on interminably. Therefore, since all good things must come to their end, please feel no need to apologize for interrupting or ending the exchange of letters by failing to reply. 

A few years before I was married, my prospective mother-in-law observed that in our conversations I insisted on "tearing up the floor boards." It is an annoying habit which I have never shed; but I try hard not to express any thoughts that might be embarrassing or offensive. If I should fail, please tell me and forgive me.

My first of several consistently unsuccessful attempts at publication was the submission to the Journal of Phenomenology of an essay with the title "Ethical and Esthetic Consciousness as Sources of Doubt about the Conceptual World." The rejection letter was dated January 18, 1961.  A book length typescript with the same title was rejected by six publishers.  A Harvard classmate of mine who was by that time working at the Harvard University Press, told me that they would only publish it subject to an endorsement by the Harvard Philosophy Department. That was a threshold so high, I didn't even bother to try. As the years passed, I became disenchanted with the pretensions of the formal academic philosophical style, and experimented with putting my thoughts into the minds, and my ideas into the conversations of fictional characters in my novels.  

Since I was writing in German, I had no American acquaintances to look at what I had written, but I was fortunate that my sister Margrit, who had a gregarious spirit, re-established our relationship to a childhood friend, Helmut Frielinghaus, who had survived the war because he was far too young for the German Army, and who, having failed in his efforts to become a publisher himself, had landed the prestigious job of editor-secretary to one Günter Grass, whom you may or may not have heard of as the most successful post-war German author of fiction. Helmut conscientiously read my novel and declared that it could not be published, that no one would want to read it, because it was written in a "classical" rather than the contemporary fashionable style.  When I discovered that "CreateSpace", a subsidiary of Amazon.com would accept my writing at no charge in its "print on demand" catalogue of books, I published six volumes, of none of which a single copy has ever been sold.

So you see, I did try to publish my writing, and when I now say that I write for myself and not for a reading public, I do so, because writing is essential for my sanity. I consider the circumstance that I accept my failure as an author with equanimity, to be just another example of the self-deception that Aesop attributed to the fox who reconciled himself to failure by persuading himself that the grapes were, after all, too sour.  

Jochen